How Moore's Law drove Intel into the arms of anthropologists

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Intel CTO Justin Rattner took the stage at Intel's annual Research Day to host what was something of a launch party for Intel's new Interaction and Experience Research Lab—essentially a place to put all of the anthropologists and ethnographers that the company has been hiring over the past decade, and also a very high-profile validation of the value that the chipmaker places on the work of these folks.

The author wanted to dig into the impact of SeaMicro

Rattner also took up the topic of Atom vs. Xeon for cloud computing in a later Q&A session, and his response to my question of what he thought about SeaMicro's 512-Atom server might surprise you.

and here is what he uncovered.

"There's a growing body of evidence that suggests that for these massive datacenters there's a different optimum—a different set of tradeoffs—between performance and energy," he explained.

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Rattner went on to say that the research backs up the idea that large clusters of fairly weak processors can be "dramatically more efficient" on certain types of cloud workloads than traditional enterprise servers (of the kind that Intel currently sells hardware for), which is why the company is eager to get to market with either SCCC or something like it.